Keynote 2: Visualization and Human Vision: A Tale of Two Systems by Ronald A. Rensink

This presentation will present some of the breakthroughs that have recently occurred in our understanding of human vision, and discuss how they might inform the design of more effective ways to visualize information. For example, although it appears to us as observers that we always see everything in front of us, recent work in visual perception has shown that this is not true: observers can have great difficulty noticing changes that occur during a brief interruption or eye movement, even if these changes are large and the observer expects them. This “change blindness” has formed the basis for considerable research over the past decade into issues such as how much of a scene is remembered, what kinds of memory systems are involved, and what role is played by visual attention. Several of the highlights of this line of research will be discussed, including the proposal that scene perception is based on a dynamic “just-in-time” process, relying on a careful interplay between internal knowledge and external information. It will then be argued that the operation of this system is similar in important ways to how humans access information via interactive visualization systems, and that this similarity can be the basis of insight into the limitations of visualization, as well as possible ways of overcoming these limitations.